While this isn't exactly the season for drinking this kind of brew, I was very thirsty the other day and craving a nice bier on the lighter side. It was time to bust open the Berliner Weisse. This is Bayerischer Bahnhof Berliner Style Weisse. I presume the word "style" is present because the brewery is in Leipzig and not Berlin.
The stuff looks a lot like a crappy American macrobrew with its light straw color. It is highly carbonated with big bubbles. The head lasted a little while and left some nice lace on the glass. Berliner Weisse is a sour beer due to the addition of lactic acid and you can smell it the sourness in addition to yeast and a faint wheaty-malty scent. (There's wheat in the bier as well.) Notably, there's no hop in the aroma. Some iterations of the style have Brettanomyces, a particular type of yeast, that does its thing in the bottle during a secondary fermentation. From what I've read, this fungus imparts a smell somewhere along the lines of wet hay but I detected none of that here. Any brewers care to weigh in? Joe?
Weighing in at only 3.0% ABV means that there isn't much of a grainy backbone here. You get a bit of malt and wheat but it's mostly the sour that comes through. To my taste, it was moderately tart. Not just a faint hint of the stuff in the background nor overwhelming to the point where you'll look like Homer Simpson after eating the Super Sour Lemon Ball. The flavor was also on the dry side and this, coupled with all the bubbles, reminded me of a nice dry sparkling wine. As with the aroma, there's no hops here.
I didn't have any syrup on hand as is common in Germany. I personally prefer the woodruff flavor. As it was, the bier was very refreshing and quenched my thirst.
Junk Food Pairing: Sans syrup, I think Bahnhof Berliner Style Weisse would go well with French fries or potato chips dipped in bleu cheese dressing.
Brettanomyces can give impart an assortment of of barnyard-like flavors and smells, but it depends on the conditions of its environment. Russian River, I've heard, has made some fairly clean beers by using Brett as the primary yeast strain. It seems that it behaves more like regular brewing yeasts when it has lots of nutrients and oxygen, as opposed to having to anaerobically clean up the scraps of an already-fermented beer. I'm no Berliner Weiss expert, but I always thought its brewers tried to promote Lactobacillus (which results in a clean, non-vinegary sourness) and avoid Brettanomyces.
ReplyDeleteI read the Brett thing at Ron Pattison's blog. From the comments it seemed like some brewers promote it while others don't.
ReplyDeleteI'll be damned. Ron had previously thought the same thing as me. It's good that people like him do actual research. Brettanomyces still doesn't seem to be a universal trait, though. Bayrischer Bahnhof actually has another beer called Brettanomyces Lambicus Berliner Style Weisse.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I noticed the post where he discovered the error of his ways. And it seems my taste buds worked!
ReplyDelete